BUILDING RAPPORT WITH MULTIPLE ACTORS
6. The Significance of an Age–friendly Co-design Process in a Multi-stakeholder Situation when Designing AFCCs
In this section we shall discuss the empirical insights in relation to the research question: What is the significance of an age–friendly co-design process in a multi-stakeholder situation when designing AFCCs?
157 6.1. Crossing Boundaries and Establishing a Shared Language around Age-friendly Co-design This project was initiated from practice (and not research), and hence there was already dialogue and early community collaboration going on by the time the authors came onboard. However, the co-design mindset and methods provided very concrete input as to how to practically go about and develop a shared language both verbally and through the co-design tools. When various professions possess different interests and bring different stakes to a project, such planning and preparation is important and should not be overlooked (Brandt & Eriksen, 2010b).
The empiricial data shows that co-design contributed to stakeholder collaboration from a three-fold perspective: between the different municipality stakeholders, between the municipality stakeholders and the older people, and among the older people themselves. Although all stakeholders had their own initial interest, the necessity of crystalizing the co-design mindset and work together to co-design specific context-specific design activities and process steps required the stakeholders to cross boundaries and to start negotiating some of these interests at a very early stage, which also laid the foundation for an infrastructure that is embedded in the local context (Björgvinsson et al., 2010). Co-design took on the role of bringing stakeholders together beyond their professional expertise and agendas and collaborating around ‘ageing’.
This was done through creating a shared language, both verbally based on values and through design tools, by collectively engaging in the early process of designing and contextualising the tools to fit the specific social and physical context (Brandt et al., 2012). Combining a co-design mindset and best practice from each of the municipal departments, municipal stakeholders with very different traditions had the opportunity to engage in a dialogue about ‘how’ to create a process that reflected the specific physical, political and social contexts. This simultaneously and iteratively fostered engagement in developing a language to accommodate different ways of expressing and communicating an opinion, which started while designing tools and continued as they were being implemented during the process, through making, telling and enacting (Brandt et al., 2012; Sanders & Stappers, 2014).
Participants further declared that the format of co-design workshops had helped bring the community together, which was something they had missed ever since the area was built, thus indicating a social need. This reflection emphasises the importance of the complex socio-spatial interdependency
between living in a community and belonging to a community (Völker, Flap, & Lindenberg, 2007) and relates to several of the topics from the WHO guidelines (World Health Organization, 2007). This aspect should not be overlooked in the process of designing AFCCs and underscores that perhaps collaborative community spaces should be considered ahead of the physical neighbourhood spaces.
In relation to ageing, combining stakeholders that hold knowledge about a specific group of older people with stakeholders who are concerned with e.g. the planning aspect of outdoor spaces offered an opportunity to bring ageing issues to the forefront of a process, building on the existing knowledge and strengths which is important when creating the multiple layers of AFCCs (O’Hehir, 2014). Co-design offered a way of establishing an infrastructure that, although the project collaboration was new, leaned on the existing contexts, e.g. in terms of recruitment, where the big turnout reflects how the project was embedded in already existing structures in the form of relationships between the older people and the Homecare Department. When it comes to older people, prior co-design studies have shown that mobilisation and recruitment can be difficult (Brandt et al., 2010; Malmborg et al., 2016). Hence collaboration with stakeholders who have their everyday work routines with older people and have established trust is enormously important for recruitment.
6.2. A Revised Image of Older People’s Resources
Scholars working with ageing (around technological solutions) have previously criticised the use of participatory design as a ‘tick box exercise’, with the main aim of demonstrating that what is done is valid and with little willingness to engage with older people in a genuine and open manner (Lindsay, Jackson, Schofield, & Olivier, 2012). In our project this open manner turned out to be tremendously important.
Articulating and acting this ‘openness’ from the perspective of all the different stakeholders illustrated to the older people that they were being taken seriously on multiple levels by the Municipality and by the research team. This, of course, cannot be a forced process and needs to be fostered from a realisation that local people are knowledgeable (Littlechild, Tanner, & Kelly, 2015) and should be considered experts of their
experiences (Sanders & Stappers, 2008; Thomson & Koskinen, 2012). Articulating this knowledge and distributing agency in the form of creativity and expertise to a group of older people, who had not previously
159 experienced this kind of participation in their current setting, proved to be tremendously important in this project for two reasons: it helped to revise an existing image of older people and their resources among the municipal stakeholders and it fostered engagement and a feeling of making a valuable contribution among the older people.
Revising the image of what an older person can contribute with in design processes brought out insights from two stakeholder groups – the Homecare managers, who thought they knew a certain age group’s resources and the TED worker, who had no prior experience and hence no expectations in regard to the older people’s engagement and contribution. As far as the title of this paper is concerned, the words
‘adrenaline’ and ‘dynamic’ came up during the interviews with the municipal stakeholders and they indicate a surprise by these stakeholders at the extent of the older people’s contribution. Further, from the perspective of the Homecare stakeholders, who had never seen this side of the group of older people before and being able to experience this contributed to their own professional pride and offered a potential for imagining other situations where such methods could be useful, e.g. in relation to the older people and their relatives.
Co-design with particular groups can begin to address established ideas such as what constitutes an expert and who posseses creativity. This requires embracing and encouraging multiple ways of contribution in order to empower people who have valuable experience to bring to the table and address existing notions of what constitutes an expert and who posseses creativity (Sanders & Stappers, 2008, 2013; Scott, 2017).
This requires to regard contribution as more than just a ‘mental’ capacity, as referred to by one of the Homecare managers, and engaging in creating tools to empower people who have valuable experience to contribute, but might not be able to express themselves in a traditional manner. In this case, the municipal stakeholders articulating that the expertise from the older people was greatly needed and providing tools that supported creativity and expertise illustrated to the older people that they were being taken seriously on multiple levels by the municipality.
Further, the revised image that the older people had of themselves reflected how they saw the potential for contributing with knowledge to future decision-making projects within the local municipality.
This inscribes their contribution into a societal context, where co-design offers older people an opportunity
to contribute on a larger scale, in the broader municipality as well as in the ageing society at large, which is a valuable outcome from working locally (Buffel et al., 2018).
Collaborating with a municipality around a real job is something that is worth taking forward when developing AFCCs with older people. This helps to contextualise the meaning of taking part as something that holds value for the municipality aligning the work community and the social community around a task that needs to be solved anyhow (Malmborg et al., 2016). This indicates that co-design can be used as an approach for working across the different topics, spanning social and physical dimensions of the ‘Age-friendly City’ model (World Health Organization, 2007).
7. Conclusion
With this paper we seek to shed light on the significance of an age-friendly co-design process when engaging with multiple stakeholders in designing AFCCs. Recommendations for future co-design processes with older people include engaging professional stakeholders as early as possible and in the actual planning and co-design of the process, as they hold valuable knowledge about a local and social context and hence are crucial for the customization and recruitment of participations and for the anchoring of a co-design process in local structures. As also shown in this study, different professions have different working cultures and processes.
Hence, in order to bring out a fruitful way of collaborating, a shared language needs to be negotiated and established. In this regard a thorough introduction to the values and philosophy of co-design as a mindset should not be underestimated.
The co-design approach further offers a way of empowering older people in ways that professional stakeholders did not expect or imagine and revises the image of what older people can contribute with in such processes. If methods and the process are planned and adjusted to include the diversity of a group, it can generate adrenaline and a different, unexpected, dynamic side to individuals and groups you thought you knew. When designing new neighbourhoods or cities, the community dimension should not be taken for granted, since feeling like a community turned out to be an important social outcome of participating in the co-design process.
161 These perspectives from local stakeholders can inform local communities, including ageing
professionals and planning professionals when engaging in and challenging existing modes of involving older people, perspectives that can benefit both the local context and the greater ageing society at large when developing future AFCCs.
Acknowledgements
We thank the participants and the different stakeholders for their enthusiastic collaboration.
We thank the APEN/Move the Neighbourhood research team who has collaborated on the overall research setup and provided insight and expertise that greatly assisted the project: Rene Kural, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Bettina Lamm, Anne Wagner &
Laura Winge, University of Copenhagen and Jens Troelsen, Charlotte Skau Pawlowski & Tanja Schmidt, University of Southern Denmark. This research was supported by Områdefornyelsen Sydhavnen, The Danish Foundation for Culture and Sports Facilities, The Velux Foundations and TrygFonden.
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